A trip report from ACCU On Sea 2026 in Folkestone, UK — the merged successor to C++ On Sea and ACCU Bristol. Highlights include Andrei Alexandrescu's keynote on AI and abstractions, Peter Muldoon's talk on modernizing legacy C++ codebases using combined static analysis and AI-generated scripts, a short talk on legally testing private class members via a C++ template loophole, and Timur Doumler's deep dive on contract assertions for virtual functions (P3097 approved for C++29). Also covered: the decorator vs. adapter distinction, HashDoS attacks via crafted unordered_map keys, a trick for making [[nodiscard]] transitive, and a keynote on the paradox of effort in AI-assisted work. The author also gave a lightning talk on clock testability and a main talk on effective code review comments.
